00:00:00 Nick: Join me as I have some questions for the boss. Hey, boss, if you’ve got five minutes, can you answer some questions? 00:00:07 Andy Whyte: Yeah, sure. 00:00:08 Nick: How do you deal with imposter syndrome? 00:00:10 Andy Whyte: Imposter syndrome. I think the thing with imposter syndrome is that everyone’s really good at giving advice around it: “Imposter syndrome? Don’t worry about it. It’s this, it’s that.” But the problem is, in the moment when you have imposter syndrome, by virtue of what it is, you think you’re the imposter. So the advice is one of those things that doesn’t necessarily click straight away. You just have to remind yourself that it’s actually a good thing. It’s a growing pain. You don’t get imposter syndrome unless you’re doing something new, in an area of growth. So I always say you only ever get it if you’re self-aware and you’re growing. If you’re missing either of those things, you won’t feel it. So it’s a good thing. 00:00:46 Nick: Yeah. When you have it in the moment, how do you center yourself? How do you bring yourself back down to earth, if you like? 00:00:55 Andy Whyte: Yeah. Well, I’ve had to learn to do that. I think the first thing, the first technique, if you like, is recognizing that you’re having a bit of imposter syndrome. For me, it tends to be when I’m going into something. That could be anything, like a keynote or just a live session with people I really respect. What happens a lot is that with an audience, whether it’s a keynote or a live session where I really respect the audience, I look out and I’m like, “These people are all the best of the best. Who am I to be talking to them?” So I just have to remind myself that what we represent is best practice, and best practice is universal. My experience of best practice somewhere else is going to be useful for them where they are. So it’s less about me in those moments, and more about reminding myself that I almost have the right to be there. I’m not an imposter, because I represent what is widely agreed to be best practice. 00:01:47 Nick: Qualifying out. How can we empower more AEs and sales leaders to be able to do this? 00:01:52 Andy Whyte: Yeah. Well, qualifying out is qualification, right? It’s part of the broader qualification. We don’t really talk about qualifying in as much, but by virtue of pursuing an opportunity, we are constantly qualifying ourselves into it. So qualifying out is just the point where you’ve come to the realization, via good qualification, that there isn’t an opportunity here for you. If you put it like that, it’s only a bad thing if you pursue an opportunity that isn’t qualified. That’s only something you’d do if you were bad at your job, or stupid, right? The only other reason people do it is that the culture they’re part of is potentially bad, where pipeline is seen as a thing where the more of it, the better. It’s a quantity-not-quality thing, so it’s a cultural problem in that regard. The best cultures are the ones that say, “Hey, qualifying out is a sign that you’re doing your job.” Good salespeople qualify out, because if you don’t qualify out, you’re going to lose the opportunity, and no one wants to be a loser. So for me, qualifying out is just the thing that happens when you’re really at the top of your game. 00:02:52 Andy Whyte: You’re on top of where you stand in the opportunity, and you know we can’t win them all. The best thing you can do in those situations is save your time, save your credibility, and focus it where you can win. 00:03:06 Nick: It feels to me like maybe an AE who’s quite fresh in a company, or in the profession more generally, has all these things they’re qualifying in: “Look at all this stuff I’ve got in my pipeline.” Is it harder to qualify out, do you think, when they’re earlier in their careers, as opposed to later on? 00:03:22 Andy Whyte: Yes. Yeah, there are a number of things there. One is that, particularly early in your career, you tend to be more focused on pipeline generation. So you know what it’s taken to find the opportunity. You might have had to work really hard to get it in the first place, so you’re a little bit more attached to it than those later in their careers, who are typically working on larger accounts. There’s more of a process that comes with those, and they typically only engage if there’s an opportunity in the first place. So yeah, people early in their careers tend to be a bit more attached, because they’ve had to work to get them. But there’s also this idea of, “If I spread my bets, I have more chance of winning,” which we know is not true. What will happen is you do a worse job, because you’re spreading yourself more thinly, and you either lose opportunities you could win, or do a worse job on them, which might mean they take longer to close, or you don’t extract as much value from them. 00:04:15 Nick: MEDDPICC, the term. How important is it that this is for the wider sales community, and that it’s not gatekept? 00:04:22 Andy Whyte: Yeah, well, you know my opinion on this. We fought very hard to unlock MEDDPICC as almost open source, as [unclear] had worked very hard to try and make it their own. It was nothing to do with them. In fact, they were actually a detractor of it before they trademarked it. So yeah, we’re big believers in this, because MEDDICC is not a zero-sum game, right? That’s why we love to call it a language. The more people who speak the language, the better. MEDDICC itself, or MEDDPICC, is very good. Obviously I’m biased; I would say that. But there are other frameworks out there with different letters and different bits and bobs that are kind of the same, right? They may index a bit more in one direction, and MEDDICC may index in another direction, but generally speaking, you could use them for the same purpose and they’ll be good. The difference between MEDDPICC and those other ones is the commonality of it, right? You can’t have a common language if nobody speaks it. Right now, I could go on to any job site advertising sales roles, and you’d find hundreds, if not thousands, of companies looking for people with MEDDPICC experience. 00:05:28 Andy Whyte: That means it self-perpetuates. If somebody is presented with an opportunity to learn MEDDPICC, they can go, “Okay, I’ve heard of this, and if I investigate it at all, I know it’s going to be something I’ll be able to use more in my career.” Not just now. It’s not just going to make me more successful at what I do today; it’s something I can take with me. It becomes part of my playbook, part of my resume. Michael Reid, the CEO of Megaport, said it best when he said MEDDPICC is like Harvard for sales. Not only is it the best learning you can get, but it’s also the one that looks best on the resume. 00:06:02 Nick: I feel like that Harvard quote is really powerful, because people don’t say that kind of thing lightly. Yeah. The other thing I’ve noticed is that, particularly more recently, more and more people have been talking about MEDDPICC. I don’t know if it’s become this thing now, but because it’s more open to the community and whatever, there’s more chatter about it. 00:06:19 Andy Whyte: Yeah, it’s a standard, right? It’s a common standard. I always say this: genuinely, hand on heart, I’ve never heard anybody credible come out with an argument against it. It’s only ever people who don’t really understand it, or have used it really badly, who have anything bad to say about it. And what you have as the opposite of that is that the best of the best in our industry use it as part of their playbook. It’s not their entire playbook, just part of it. But it’s something that, obviously, we’ve built on a lot to make broader as part of the playbook: not just qualification, but methodology, a value framework, and all these other things we’ve built on top of it. But yeah, it’s a standard. 00:06:58 Nick: What is your advice for an SDR or a BDR looking to transition into an AE role? 00:07:03 Andy Whyte: One word: stories. Learn the stories about your solution, the customer stories. Get as close as you can to successful account executives, sales engineers and customer success managers, and embrace and learn the stories. You want to know: what was life like before our solution, right? What horrible things were happening? Really try to understand those things. And now, what’s this utopian state? What’s different? What good stuff is happening? What pain have we got rid of? How are they seeing that pop up? What sort of value are they getting? What metrics are they getting? What was it about our solution that made it possible? What are the things about our solution without which they couldn’t have got any of those benefits, the real unique differentiators we have? And then find out who the personas are that are benefiting from that. What are their names? What are their roles? If we were to talk to them, what would they say? And most importantly, who are the ones who, if you were to take our solution away, would be absolutely fuming? They’d be upset. They’d be like, “I can’t do my job without this.” 00:08:06 Andy Whyte: Find those personas, understand their stories, and then take those stories to new prospective customers. Find those people in the new prospect’s business and tell them the stories. It’s the best way an SDR can level themselves up, because, A, everyone loves a story. And B, the story encapsulates all the things you have to know. You don’t have to be a product expert, a solution expert, an industry expert, all those things. You can just learn the stories, and people remember stories. The people you tell won’t remember the features, the bells and whistles, but they will remember the story, and they’ll go and tell other people in the business about it. So stories are the best way to sell, and the best way to learn as well. 00:08:49 Nick: You have a particular take on the BDR and SDR role, and a lot of what you talked about there actually ties in with it: that, yes, it’s kind of a sales role, but it’s almost more of a marketing role. Are you going to get in trouble for saying those things? 00:09:05 Andy Whyte: Yeah, yeah. People get mad about this, because for some reason they think it’s a bad thing. I think it’s a very, very, very good thing. For me, if you blanked everybody’s memory of what department BDRs and SDRs predominantly report into, or what it’s classed as, their work is more like marketing. They’re trying to capture attention, and they’re trying to get engagement to start a sales process, which for me is much closer to marketing than it is to actually selling. You’re doing positioning. You’re doing your attention-grabbing. You’re basically doing all of the tenets of marketing to get someone’s attention, which is a very, very good thing for your sales career, by the way. The best salespeople are also very good at marketing. They understand marketing. So yeah, it’s an unpopular opinion. And I’m not going to get into it, but I’m not saying they should report to marketing or anything like that. That’s an open question that depends on many other factors. But for me, the actual skill set of BDRs and SDRs is much closer to marketing. 00:10:09 Nick: What’s your wildest sales story? 00:10:13 Andy Whyte: This one comes to mind. I always have one that comes to mind. It might not be that wild, but I like telling it because it’s such a glorious feeling. I worked as a salesperson for a SaaS company that had a product that was quite new, with functionality that could do things in real time, right? I won’t go into the details. So I did a LinkedIn post about it, saying, “It’s great, and these are the benefits of this.” And somebody from a competitor got very angry in the comments and basically called me a liar, saying it wasn’t possible. Which, of course, it was. I wasn’t lying. It was very much a possible thing. But because of the way the LinkedIn algorithm works, it basically just likes rage, right? It lit a fire under the post and showed it to all the people in that person’s network. And one of their potential customers, this large travel company, who were actually in the final closing stages of a deal with this person, then reached out to me and said, “Hey, is this really real time?” And I was like, “Yeah.” So we had a meeting, and we closed the deal. 00:11:15 Andy Whyte: They would never have heard of us. They would never have got in touch if it wasn’t for the competitor getting angry in the comments on my LinkedIn post. So I like telling that story, because it just makes me feel... ha! 00:11:33 Nick: What’s the cheekiest thing you’ve seen in your sales career, or that maybe happened to you? 00:11:38 Andy Whyte: Cheekiest. Okay, I’ll try and keep this a short story. When I was at Oracle, I was selling this product called Sales Cloud, which is their CRM product. It was relatively new at the time. I think it was called Sales Cloud, as I remember it. I came across this opportunity where an organization that used Salesforce, which is the predominant sales CRM, had acquired another large company that used Microsoft Dynamics, and there was an initiative to consolidate to one system or the other. I can’t remember how I found out about it, but I did, and I said to the CIO, “Well, if you’re going to be moving from one to the other, it’s basically a new implementation. It’s not really a consolidation; you’re going to start again. So you might as well consider Oracle as well.” And everyone thought I was mad, because they’d already got expertise in both, or at worst, expertise in one, if nothing else. Surely they were going to lean toward one or the other. But long story short, we did actually win the deal. 00:12:35 Andy Whyte: And the reason we won the deal, as a side note, is something I didn’t know at the time, but what we’d now class as influencing the decision criteria. We spotted something they needed and were able to personalize our proposition to be very good at solving it. But it was something both Salesforce and Microsoft could do as well; they just didn’t capture the opportunity. As deals go, I guess I did a good job. We won the deal. But the outcome looked much better than that, because Oracle had never displaced Salesforce before. It just hadn’t happened. No one would take out Salesforce and replace it with Oracle CRM. It wasn’t supposed to happen. So this was a slightly unique circumstance, and there was a lot of applause. It was deal of the quarter, all this sort of great stuff. But if I’m being honest, I just did an okay job. There was nothing anyone else wouldn’t have done, given the opportunity. But when I was interviewing for a new role, of course, you’re asked about a deal you’re proud of in an interview. So I told this story. I told them what happened, how we differentiated, and how it was the first time Oracle’s product had displaced Salesforce, and blah, blah. 00:13:50 Andy Whyte: It obviously did a good job of impressing the hiring manager, because I got the job. Fast forward maybe three or four months, and I’m at my desk, and the manager comes and puts his hands on my shoulders from behind, which is a bit weird anyway. I don’t do that. And he said, “I’ve just done an interview, and I’ve heard all about this deal I thought you closed, but apparently somebody else closed it.” And I was thinking, “All right, tell me more.” He went on to say that he’d interviewed someone who had basically told the same story I told. And I was like, “Come on, it’s too unique for it to be another situation.” At Oracle, you have big teams with lots of people on them, so there were lots of other people on the team who could tell the story, because they were part of the team; they just weren’t leading on it. So I thought it was one of those. He wouldn’t tell me who it was, but, like a muppet, he left his calendar open, so I was able to see. And it wasn’t someone who was on the team. It was someone in my team, a peer of mine, who had nothing to do with that deal. So I thought, not only is it a bit cheeky using somebody else’s story to try and get a job, you should at least make sure they’re not at the company you’re interviewing with. Didn’t get the job. 00:14:48 Nick: So that’s all for this one. Yeah. Thank you very much. 00:14:51 Andy Whyte: Thank you all.
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